Tag: podcasts

Recommended Reading/Listening: PseudoPod 886: “A Wonder of Nature, In Need of Killing” by VG Campen

PseudoPod 886: “A Wonder of Nature, In Need of Killing” by VG Campen

I loved this story, especially given the wonderful voice acting by narrator Sevatividam. Very strong vibes of “illegitimate lovechild of True Grit and H.P. Lovecraft.” Recommended for those who enjoy voicey first-person narrators, down-holler riverside oxy-and-meth country Americana, turtle soup, and county fairs.

You can listen to this story wherever you get podcasts, or at the following link, which also features the full text for those who prefer reading over being read to:

PseudoPod 886: “A Wonder of Nature, In Need of Killing” by VG Campen

(art credit: “Kalmarian swamp turtle” by Halycon450 released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License)

Recommended Listen: Rick Rubin interviews Tom Hanks

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin: Tom Hanks

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t always agree with Rubin’s choice of guests. But when this show is good, it’s really, really good. This episode with Tom Hanks is a really good one. I always love listening to accomplished craftsmen discuss craft (as I’ve said before, if there was a documentary interviewing accomplished old plumbers called “Talking Toilets,” I’d be there). In part, I just enjoy hearing the intricacies of any craft. But I also like the consistency that I hear across crafts and craftspeople, and it boils down to something like this:

In order to be good at a craft, we need to accept and embrace the fact that we are an intelligent conduit for that craft. We are nothing more, and certainly nothing less.

Hanks says basically that in a gajillion little different ways here, and each is worth hearing.

Recommended Read/Listen: PseudoPod 867: “Chainsaw: As Is” by Gillian King-Cargile

PseudoPod 867: “Chainsaw: As Is” by Gillian King-Cargile

I like a lot about this story: the pacing, the order and layering of new information, the economy of that information and how it’s conveyed, the lightly experimental use of evolving ad copy to punctuate and modulate that story (and, in the case of the audio, the sound engineering around that to differentiate these asides from the main narrative flow). It’s worth a half-hour of your time.

Recommended Listening: Mayfair Watchers Society

I often bounce from a fiction Podcast because I’m a “monster-of-the-week” guy (in the X-Files sense of “Monster-of-the-week” vs “Mythology”), and far too many “serial drama”-style podcasts 1) fall in love with their Mythology arc and 2) the writers (in my humble) just cannot sustain those long, heavy arcs. Listening becomes a chore and strain; I have enough chores, and if I wanted homework I’d go to grad school.

Thus far, Mayfair Watchers Society is delivering the thing I desperately wanted: a monster-a-week, no cast of 1000s to keep track of over years-long lightly scripted arcs. You can pick it up anywhere; Autopsy happened to have been the episode where I resoundingly felt “This is for me!“

Also, love the art!

Enjoy!

Mayfair Watchers Society: “The Autopsy” (Season 1, Ep. 3)

cover art for "The Autopsy" shows a chicken-footed smile monster in the doorway

Recommended Read (Listen): “Bring Rope” by Liam Hogan

An excellent little horror story; starts ~4min 30secs into this episode of Tales to Terrify: Tales to Terrify 306 Liam Hogan Franz Kafka.  This podcast is usually pretty solid, if you like straight-up traditional audiobook-style readings of short horror fiction.  Puts me in the mind of Kathe Koja’s The Cipher—but more for art reasons than horror reasons.

At the urging of @dhelder I listened to this…

…and learned that, if you wanna know what it’s like being me, microdose LSD.

Episode #44—”Shine On You Crazy Goldman”—from Reply All

(DISCLOSURE: I have indeed dropped acid. It made me almost entirely unbearably me-like.  None of this constitutes an endorsement of anything other than this particular episode of this podcase.)